Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year. The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals. At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%. “We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources,” he said. Professor Post’s group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.

Though they are purportedly less harmful than other non-lethal weapons, such as tasers and rubber bullets, the International Committee of the Red Cross is concerned that not enough has been done to lessen the risk of people suffering permanent blindness. Dazzlers are designed to warn people away by temporarily blinding them with pulses of green laser light. Unlike tasers or rubber bullets, there is no possibility that the lasers could kill a person, they just create a beam that is too intense to look at. Most models that have been built for military use are designed to work at distances of 300 to 500 metres during the day and a kilometre or so at night. This makes them attractive for long-range use at sea to stop vessels suspected of drug trafficking, for example. At 40 metres, however, the intense beam of a 200-milliwatt laser can permanently damage eyes. Despite this, they have seen regular use in Iraq since 2006.

“I used to take her car to the city to buy drugs,” said a contrite Peter Davis, 52, who says he’s a recovering addict and lives with his mom in an Englewood, NJ, apartment. It’s actually Davis’ mother, Jean, 75, who is shamed on the Port Authority’s Web site as owing the most money of any scofflaw. But yesterday, Peter admitted to The Post that he’s the one who racked up the debt, by using her Ford Focus for years to blow through tolls on numerous trips to Manhattan to get high. “When you’re addicted like that you don’t think of he consequences. You have other things on your mind,” he said. Thanks to Peter’s many drug junkets, his mom is in the hole for $21,365 in unpaid tolls and has accrued $102,141 in fines — a sum that continues to grow.

The US Air Force has a history of imaginative weaponry proposals. Whitehurst says “many attempts have been made over the years to impede naval forces in a variety of manners, including floating smoke pots, entanglement devices, and even ‘floating purple mountains of shaving cream’ … but none ever made it into wide use.” More flashily, plans prepared long ago at the US Air Force’s Wright laboratory, in Dayton, Ohio, called for development of a potent chemical weapon. This is the so-called gay bomb that makes enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Wright laboratory was awarded the Ig Nobel peace prize, in 2007, for instigating that line of research.

Researchers at Harvard University said they have successfully made a DNA robot which acts almost as a postal worker and is capable of targeting particular cells such as cancerous cells and deliver them self-destruction order. The robots were designed in the shape of an open barrel made of two halves joined by a hinge. The two halves are held shut by special DNA latches that respond to particular targets by allowing the two halves to swing open and expose their payload. To produce the biologic robot, George M. Church, Shawn Douglas and their colleagues used a technique called ‘DNA origami’, in which long DNA chains are folded in a prescribed way. The programmable nanorobot also carries on its surface some peptide molecules called aptamers that can identify specific proteins on the outer layer of the targeted cells and bind to them, researchers wrote in the journal Science.

A report this week showing rampant foreclosure abuse in San Francisco reflects similar levels of lender fraud and faulty documentation across the United States, say experts and officials who have done studies in other parts of the country. The audit of almost 400 foreclosures in San Francisco found that 84 percent of them appeared to be illegal, according to the study released by the California city on Wednesday. “The audit in San Francisco is the most detailed and comprehensive that has been done – but it’s likely those numbers are comparable nationally,” Diane Thompson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told Reuters.

‘It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, “Watch this. I need a witness.” And then I ducked under the table and did it,’ he said. Cook claimed he was about 65 feet from the president at the event when he snorted the drugs. ‘It wasn’t like I got high. The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn’t about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president. I’m not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it,’ he told Playboy.

The latest UN figures indicate that the output of heroin increased by 61 percent in Afghanistan last year despite the Western claims about their will to curb the production of drugs during the invasion of the war-battered country. Opium production by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons. Last year, levels increased by 61 percent, with more than 90 percent of heroin found on British streets being traced back to opiates cultivated in Afghanistan, according to UN figures. The UN figures make grim reading for those who backed the invasion of Afghanistan. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in 2001 that a significant reason for deployment of foreign forces to Afghanistan was to curtail a flourishing heroin trade.

✸ Radiation detected 400 miles off Japanese coast

Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant disaster has been detected as far as almost 400 miles off Japan in the Pacific Ocean, with water showing readings of up to 1,000 times more than prior levels, scientists reported Tuesday.

In early 1945, Ebb Cade, a worker at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility, got into a car wreck. He survived, but was bed bound with a broken arm and a broken leg. When doctors interviewed him, they ascertained that the fifty-three-year-old African American man was otherwise perfectly healthy, eating well, drinking well, and had no history of serious illness. And so, having obtained a healthy subject, on April 10th his doctors secretly injected him with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. Who exactly ordered the injection, and who exactly administered it, has never been determined, with the most likely candidates all contradicting each other.

Britain’s credit rating took a knock this week, when Moody’s expressed a ‘negative outlook’ for the national economy. But who are the mysterious agencies who take it upon themselves to grade everything from countries to corporations – and how much power do they really wield?

A man and woman were arrested in what authorities described as the biggest PCP bust in memory after 139 gallons of the drug – worth nearly $100 million on the street – was seized by an L.A. County narcotics task force. Long Beach Police Department is a part of L.A. IMPACT. Darryl Dwayne Burton, 55, and Lagina Bell Huckaby, 31, were arrested Wednesday at a UPS store in Culver City where they were allegedly trying to ship drugs, according to Lt. Scott Fairfield of the Los Angeles Intra-agency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, or L.A. IMPACT. “It’s the largest PCP seizure I’ve ever heard of,” he said. Enough of the drug was seized to dose nearly 10 million people at cost of about $15 each, authorities said. About $389,000 in cash was seized as part of the investigation.

“Think about how many people could die if a cyber terrorist attacked our air traffic control system and planes slammed into one another,” Rockefeller said. “Or if rail switching networks were hacked—causing trains carrying people—or hazardous materials—to derail and collide in the midst of some of our most populated urban areas, like Chicago, New York, San Francisco or Washington.” Yes, and think about how life would suck if someone hacked the road system in West Virginia and turned all roads into cabbage patches? I mean, if we’re talking about total hypotheticals with no actual likelihood of happening, that seems just as reasonable a scenario as Rockefeller’s. It’s pure, insane, unsupported hypothetical fear mongering.

The EPA omitted critical information in its assessment, and current dioxin levels are a significant health risk. Dioxin levels will increase when Dow’s Agent Orange 2,4-D resistant crops are planted. The EPA’s lack of interest in dioxin DCDD is disgusting. Dioxin DCDD that contaminates 2,4-D herbicide is not tested, measured or monitored by the EPA, or even regulated. A Canadian research paper states that dioxin DCDD may have large public health implications due to its prevalence in our food and environment.

The SOPA and PIPA bills that went down in flames earlier this year for their unbearable intrusiveness, used content piracy as an excuse to give the government powerful tools with which to censor Internet content. For 2012 the primary author of those bills has switched to a fallback tactic: using child porn as an excuse to create a vast surveillance network from which the government can demand data on every email sent, site visited or link clicked on by all but a fraction of one percent of the U.S. population. Internet anti-censorship advocates including Anonymous are calling for the ouster of Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, who is following his co-sponsorship of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) with a bill critics call “Big Brother” disguised as an effort to curb child porn and sexual abuse.

Al Jazeera interviews graffiti artists JR and RSH for this spot on graffiti as the world’s oldest form of social media.

Isolated family in Kentucky started producing blue children in 1800s French orphan Martin Fugate married pale American Elizabeth Smith Had seven children, four were blue; they intermarried with local family Genetic mutation reduces individual’s ability to carry oxygen in blood Intermarriage led to ‘pure’ gene pool which often met ‘met-H’ gene

“Ehud then approached him…and said, “I have a message from God for you.” As the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king’s belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it.” – Judges 3:20-22

Sawyer wanted to know what Houston was on. Everyone wanted to know what Houston was on, and news reports after her death took unconfirmed inventory of the pills in her hotel suite, wondering if they represented the extent of her indulgences. No. By many accounts, Houston also drank. More than a little. In fact one early, leading theory about the cause of her death, which won’t be known until toxicology tests are finished, was that a mix of prescription drugs and alcohol did her in. But while the drugs leapt immediately to the foreground, with questions raised about which doctors and pharmacies had provided them, the alcohol receded from focus, as it too often does. Wrongly, perilously, we tend not to attribute the same destructive powers to it that we do to powders, capsules and vials.

It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harrass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid. climate_desk_bugBut now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.

✧ A Woman’s Walk Reveals Her Orgasms

A study conducted by Dr. Stuart Brody, at the University of West Scotland found a relationship between the fluidity with which a woman walks and her ability to have vaginal orgasms. They discovered that women with a more fluid stride were reported to experience orgasms more readily than women with locked and rigid pelvises.

The Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm wants to trick out troops’ brains, from the areas that regulate alertness and cognition to pain treatment and psychiatric well-being. And the scientists want to do it all from the outside in — with a gadget installed inside the troops’ helmets. “Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound,” the Defense Department’s Armed with Science blog promises. It’s the latest out-there project in the military’s growing arsenal of brain-based research. In recent months alone, the Pentagon’s funded projects to optimize troop’s minds, prevent injuries and even preemptively assess cognitive ability and vulnerability to traumatic stress. Now, Darpa’s funding one lab that’s trying to do it all — from boosting troop smarts to preventing traumatic brain injuries.

Thanks Baller.

Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.

Google’s agreement with Verizon to speed certain Internet content to users opens the door to the complete sterilization of the world wide web as a force for political change. Under Google’s takeover plan, the Internet will closely resemble cable TV, independent voices will be silenced and the entire Internet will be bought up by transnational media giants.

Ever thought it’d be cool to take some hallucinogenic drugs and check out a movie—say, sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey? This guy thought it’d be cool. And his trip—and resultant freakout—was recorded by five different audience members.

Park officials in China have found a way to stop people from hogging their benches for too long – by fitting steel spikes on a coin-operated timer.

This carpenter ant (Camponotus leonardi) is caught in the throes of a fungus-induced death grip. It has clamped itself to a leaf 25 centimetres above a forest floor in Thailand, and died. The reason is growing out of the back of its head. The reddish-brown stalk is made by a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which has invaded the ant’s body and manipulated its behaviour. The exposed position is ideal for releasing spores. It turns out this parasitic mind-control is at least 48 million years old. David Hughes of Harvard University and colleagues discovered fossilised leaves of this age in Messel, Germany that bore characteristic “death grip” scars, suggesting that ants once clamped themselves onto them.

While it’s women who are seeking the surgery, it’s conservative men, and their desire to marry virgins, that’s driving the trend. In China, it costs as “little as 5,000 renminbi, or about $737, for a 20- to 30-minute procedure,” the Post reports. In the simplest form of the procedure, a surgeon uses “catgut sutures to approximate hymen remnants (with or without incorporation of a gelatin capsule containing a blood-like substance which bursts on intercourse),” according to the British Medical Journal.